Scientists study media coverage of their research

The Royal Society, Britain's most eminent academy for scientific research, yesterday announced an inquiry into whether the public is being dangerously misled by the way new research is carried out and publicised.

The initiative stems from growing anxiety over complaints about unreliable research findings which are given huge media coverage.

The society set up a working party with a wide brief to investigate the reliability of existing checks on work funded not only by the government but by large companies and by pressure groups.

Two of the controversies which helped trigger the inquiry were concern over coverage given earlier this year to the Raelian Movement's unproven claim to have cloned humans, and an earlier dispute over findings on the risks of genetically modified food.

Yesterday Sir Patrick Bateson, who heads the working group, said researchers could attract publicity "for highly questionable results even when they offer no evidence that their research has been checked".

The society wants the group to recommend improvements to present methods since research, right or wrong, could have "quite profound effects on public opinion and policy".

The inquiry is being held in a climate where results from researchers - because of their profession's reputation for objectivity - are increasingly seized upon and reported round the world.

A check found that in the past week the trusting phrase "research shows" had been used 73 times on the Guardian's incoming home wires service. The service covers thousands of reports from the Press Association news agency, freelance agencies, the Central Office of Information, and public relations agencies.

In the past month the same phrase has been used 28 times in reports in the Guardian, 22 times in the Times, 15 times in the Daily Mirror and 14 times in the Daily Mail.

The Royal Society group will look at "peer review", the process used by most science journals to vet research papers submitted to them. This involves scrutiny of the papers' results and interpretation by scientists in the same field.

The working group includes Phillip Campbell, editor of Nature; Andrew Sugden, the editor of Science; Professor Paul Harvey, head of Oxford University's zoology department; Mike Owen, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline's senior vice-president; and Jon von Radowitz, the Press Association science correspondent.